The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(98)
And he’d done plenty of his own.
Millie swallowed audibly, trying to decide whether to be pleased at his honest compliment, or to be offended by his dismissal of her entire profession. “Not all of us live a life as exciting and treacherous as yours, Mr. Argent,” she said as she added a few more jeweled pins to her intricate coiffure, if only to give her restless hands something to do. “Most of us merely like to be kissed by danger or violence or death. Maybe even let it kiss us, upon occasion. We like to make it a spectacle at which to gasp and laugh, or cry. Though it is only the thrill we want to take home with us, not the reality. We still desire to return to our warm beds, all safe and sound, when the night is over.” She considered her words only after she’d said them. She was taking the danger home with her tonight, wasn’t she? There was a very good chance her bed would be anything but safe.
And, Lord forgive her, it was more thrilling than she’d like to admit.
“But not everyone makes it home safe and sound,” he rumbled.
Not with men like him about.
Millie’s heart stalled and her hand froze halfway to her hair. “True…” She drew the word out, searching for what to say next. “But we expect to. We hope to, don’t we?”
“I know nothing of hope.” He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his long, powerful legs. “So people attend the theater to feel afraid and safe at the same time?”
Millie chewed her lip, considering her words carefully. “Sometimes, surely, but mostly they go to play voyeur to the human experience. Drama, I think, does one of two things for a person, it allows us to be a little more grateful for the humdrum of the everyday, or makes us yearn for something above whom and what we are. It can remind us to not let every moment slip into the next without reaching for more. Whether we reach within ourselves or for something we want out in the world. A dream, a home, money, adventure … or love.”
Feeling impassioned, she turned in her seat to gesture at him. “Drama can make you experience the very extremes of emotion. A good playwright, Shakespeare, for example, can use language to allow an actor to convey an emotion that resonates with the audience. That allows them—sometimes even forces them—to feel. Coupled with the performance and the right music and lighting … I think that emotion is contagious and complex, and often a person doesn’t know which until they experience it under the Bard’s very own tutelage. It’s quite extraordinary, really, almost magical and—” Millie let her voice die away, noticing that Christopher Argent hadn’t blinked for an astonishingly long time.
In the middle of her dressing room, done in all shades of chaos and color, he was a monochromatic study in dove and granite. All but for his eyes and hair, both of which were uncommon in their variegation. His jaw was too wide to be called handsome, his mouth too caustic for its fullness, surrounded by brackets that made him look alternately cruel and somehow inanimate. His eyes made him appear ancient. Not so much in years, but in experience.
What horrors he must have seen in his life, some of them perpetrated by his own hands.
“Forgive me,” she breathed, entranced by the moment, as though he were a serpent and she his prey, mesmerized by his menace. “I do tend to get carried away.”
He once more brushed aside her words. “You have … experienced all these emotions?”
What an odd question. “Most of them, yes.”
“Are you—in love—with someone?”
She hadn’t realized that someone so still could become even more motionless. It was as though he’d stopped breathing in anticipation of her answer.
“No,” she answered honestly, and had the impression that his chest compressed.
“Have you ever been?”
“I can’t say that I have truly loved anyone, except Jakub.” She glanced at her son, still oblivious to the world around him, and then back to the assassin.
An expression flickered across his features, but was gone before she could identify it. This time when he looked at her, his eyes were gentler, somehow. Still frightfully opaque, but they had lost some of their frost.
“Do you wish to be in love?”
Had any other man asked, she’d have told him that it was no business of his. She’d have lied or misdirected him somehow, to avoid the question. But behind the callousness of Christopher Argent’s expression was an earnest curiosity. A lack of judgment or malice.
It was a sincere question that deserved a sincere answer.
“I—I’m never really certain. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Shakespeare, from most any playwright, it is that love is just as dangerous an emotion as hatred or anger or the lust for power. I think love can make you a stranger, even to yourself. Maybe even a monster. It can be a wild creature just waiting to be unbound. A beast. A feral and selfish thing that will turn you against the world, against nature or reason, against God, Himself. And every time I’m tempted to allow myself to fall, I wonder … is it worth the risk?”
His brows drew together. “What if there is no risk? What if God, if He even exists, has turned away from you, and so to turn from Him would be no great sin? There would be nothing in the way of reaching for what you wanted.”
Millie blinked, startled by his bleak assessment. “Is that what is going on here? Do you believe God has forsaken you, and so you no longer fear Him? Is that how you’re able to…” She paused, checking on Jakub to make certain he wasn’t listening in. “To do what it is that you do?”